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Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

energyrealityproject.com

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Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#131

Post by PolLambert »

anon1mous wrote: post #122
yongjik wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bury it deep enough? Somehow everybody freaks out about nuclear waste and says stuff like "But after 20,000 years it will still retain half of its radiation!" Well, our industrial waste also contain mercury and other heavy metals. We usually just bury them. Somehow nobody freaks out and says "But after 20,000 years it will still retain ALL of its toxicity!" I can't fathom why.

Very simple - a few tones of Uranium or Plutonium, dispersed in air or water can kill the population of a continent.

Which is why you bury it.

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#132

Post by mikeyouse »

vonmoltke wrote: post #118
mikeyouse wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much exactly what it means.. They have actual measurements of environmental radiation.. In anything orange or red, you're looking at a minimum of 20mSv/year which is about 1/2 of the annual dose limit for US nuclear workers.. In the deep red areas, you're looking at more than 50mSv/year which is approaching the level of increased cancer incidence. Nobody is going to live in those areas for a very long t…

Nobody is going to be allowed to live in those areas for a very long time. That doesn't mean it isn't safe to live there. It means an overcautious government won't let people live there. You even said yourself the highest levels outside the plant grounds are only approaching the levels of increased cancer incidence. So, what other than abundance of caution and paranoia about radiation is keeping people from returning…

Are you honestly arguing that dozens of mSv of radiation annually are safe? That big bad government is preventing people from doing what they want?

50mSv is approaching the level of guaranteed higher incidence of cancer -- If you lived in the exclusion zone, you'd be receiving that every single year for the rest of your, and your childrens' lives.

Canada did a survey a few years ago of all their nuclear workers, at much lower levels of lifetime radiation (The relative lack of cancer deaths in Ukraine wasn't due to 'safe' fallout, but due to the fact that they just closed entire cities and forced everyone within a thousand square miles to leave.

[1] - http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/153/4/309.long

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#133

Post by blakeyrat »

interconnector wrote: post #8
peoii wrote: post #2

It's the sad truth that people seem very for nuclear, but no one wants to live near it. Of course, I've seen articles regarding people who don't want to live near wind turbines, so maybe people are just far to fickle.

Have you ever stood next to giant wind turbines? While driving through an area with hundreds of 100 meter wind turbines, I stopped to take a closer look at them. They are genuinely fear inducing, and feel alien. I could not stay close to one for more than a few minutes before I was overcome with dread.

How do you feel about windmills like this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/De_Liefd...

Genuinely curious. I've never heard of a phobia like yours before, is it just because of the motion, or is there something different about steel towers than stone ones?

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#134

Post by Turing_Machine »

vanessapu wrote: post #3

I absolutely agree that nuclear is our best option as long as the reactor and the waste is located in your backyard.

I'd much rather have a nuclear plant in my back yard than a coal plant, or even a natural gas plant, much less some uber-noisy bird-killing wind farm of an equivalent capacity.

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#135

Post by ebbv »

jcranmer wrote: post #127
ebbv wrote: post #17

This article is pretty terrible. The bias is just ridiculous. When discussing wind and solar the author constantly makes assumptions that favor worst cases, and makes questionable comparisons. For example; stating that "more Americans" died from installing rooftop solar than have died from construction or use of nuclear power, cherry picking the most dangerous possible activity related to solar power (some guy up on…

The total number of people who have died in all nuclear radiation incidents (excluding the use of atomic weapons) is perhaps 20,000, with all but 100 coming from a single incident (Chernobyl). That number is less than the number of people who will have died from pollution from coal power points, alone, last year, let alone the effects of coal mining. Nuclear power has a big image problem: people overestimate the expe…

Yes but how does it compare with the number of people who have died due to solar or wind power?

And while Fukushima may have had a "low" number of fatalities (so far), the mortality statistics don't even begin to paint a full picture of the negative impact of these disasters.

Nuclear power has an "image problem" for a reason; when a disaster happens it's a truly major disaster.

> If you scale deaths per TWh, nuclear is by far the safest form of energy--solar is about 5 times as deadly.

This is totally ridiculous and arbitrary, and only true because so many average people fall off of their roof while installing solar panels.

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#136

Post by pippy »

I'm in the awkward position of supporting nuclear power in a country that has its anti-nuclear stance apart of its national identity. New Zealands Prime Minster David Lange famously argued against it at an Oxford Union debate, and ever since kiwis have viewed it as us standing against the 'big guy'.

Some people I've spoken to view this as on par with not supporting the All Blacks. To top this off, they typically have an irrational fear of nuclear power steaming from pop culture such as The Simpsons.

It's New Zealand's dirty little secret that we're no where near the "100% pure" ad campaigns we're running. Half our rivers are polluted beyond repair. We have less forest coverage than Japan. We flooded vast tracts of land for our dams. And we're still dependent on non renewables for our electricity.

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#137

Post by seanflyon »

novalis78 wrote: post #129
seanflyon wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think unregulated nuclear is a good idea. Safer reactors would require less regulation and you could argue that even for current reactors our regulation is excessive. The bottom line is that efficient regulation is a hard problem and to use nuclear power we need to either solve that problem or endure inefficient regulation.

It's not that simple. Nuclear regulation in the US has turned (similar to the FDA) into an innovation stifling behemoth... It's a lobbying place and a capital sink and has little to do with safety. If it was about safety, they would shut down current reactor designs yesterday and had started working on Thorium alternatives 20 years ago. The youtube link I posted from TEAC7 conference does explain that quite well.

I'm not arguing in favor of our current regulation, I'm saying that it is hard to fix and you can't throw it out altogether.

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#139

Post by novalis78 »

NolF wrote: post #108
beefman wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing about nuclear fission requires startup capital to be large.

The design and safe construction does.

Very informative read and eye opener on this topic: http://thorconpower.com/costing/should-cost-versus-did-cost

Re: Why nuclear energy is our best option at the moment

#140

Post by Retric »

iaw wrote: post #90
lumberjack wrote: post #62

The article looks at the cost of energy over the lifetime of the nuclear power plant. There is no argument that energy generated through fission is very cheap when looked at that way. However that totally ignores the enormous startup costs. The great thing about wind and solar is that you don't have to build a whole farm. You can start small and keep adding as you come across more capital. In any case I don't see why…

The startup capital required for nuclear fission is so immense that it doesn't make sense from an economic time-value perspective. The problem with most renewables (excl. thermal and hydro) is that they are incapable of meeting 100% of electricity demands by their nature without better storage technology. The economics are pushing towards renewables but I feel that nuclear makes more sense for our society in the near…

99% of the worlds grid storage is pumped hydro because nothing else works out. Pumped storage is 70% to 85% efficient, can come online within 15 seconds, and works at scale.

The reservoir can provide about 13 GW·h of stored gravitational potential energy (convertible to electricity at about 80% efficiency), or about 2% of China's daily electricity consumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianhuangping_Pumped_Storage_P...

Construction cost: $900 million USD maintenance costs are also minimal.

PS: ~14 GWh for 1 billion ~= 14 MWh for 1 million = ~14 kwh for 1000$. http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall = 7 kWh for 3k or 2.3kwh per 1,000$ and much shorter lifetime.

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